


The Adventure of the Home-Made Meth

by ElapsedSpiral



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Crack, Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-22
Updated: 2012-04-22
Packaged: 2017-11-04 02:55:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/388901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElapsedSpiral/pseuds/ElapsedSpiral
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Warning: some language, some "mind blowing sex", plot-lite and pretty silly.</p><p>Summary:  A trip to the supermarket means stocking up on snacks and essentials for John and cracking down on a meth production ring for Sherlock. Naturally.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Adventure of the Home-Made Meth

“A man of my massive intellect should not be in here, of all places,” Sherlock announced, causing a passing woman to give him a decidedly unimpressed look that the detective either chose to ignore or failed to notice entirely.

“Well unless a man of your massive intellect can survive without food-“ Sherlock chose to look dubious, “okay, without Relentless energy drinks, I suggest you just go along with it.”

“I do like Relentless,” the detective noted, eyes already scouring the entrance of the supermarket from the flickering strip light several metres down the aisle to a patch of dried grass that had clumped on the entrance mat, “Though its effects are hardly as marked as cocaine.”

“Sherlock, we’re in public,” John said testily as he slotted a pound coin into the trolley lock and pulled it free, one wheel threatening to send the trolley diagonal as well as forward, “Could you try not talking casually about using illegal drugs?”

Sherlock gave a sigh, pulling his scarf closer about his chin to hide his frowning mouth a fraction.

“What else am I supposed to do? I have no idea how these places are meant to work.”

“It’s a supermarket, don’t be ridiculous - you couldn’t have survived on plovers eggs alone at Oxford.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes.

“You really must accept that I’m not Sebastian Flyte John.”

John opted to simply wave the list he had hastily scrawled on the back of an old receipt rather than retort

“Help me find some of these things. We’ll be done in half the time,” giving the detective a weary look he added for emphasis, “Your great intellect was focused upon watching back to back Jeremy Kyle before I dragged you out for some fresh air.”

Sherlock grabbed the list roughly from the other man, scanned it then returned it with a simple shake of his head.

“Can’t read your handwriting.”

“Well I can read you a few things, just remember them and-“

To his despair John could tell that Sherlock had already become distracted, wandering further along the aisle and coming to stop alongside an abandoned shopping trolley. To the doctor’s embarrassment the man bent down over the trolley to study the contents, eyes narrowed with thought. He shouldn’t encourage him, he knew. A bored Sherlock was a dangerous Sherlock he had come to learn in a matter of days after having moved into 221b. It was better to simply ignore his odd turns, like he has a misbehaving child.

“Eggs,” he read from the list, “Milk-“

“Meth.”

“What?” John looked up from the list, wheeling their own empty trolley up alongside Sherlock, still staring intently at the contents of the abandoned cart.

Sherlock shot John a stern look out of the corner of his eye before pointing at several items in the trolley he had found.

“Lye. Solvent. Cold medicine. Meth. The ingredients for homemade meth. Lestrade mentioned there had been a rise in production and distribution of meth in recent months, I didn’t care, mundane crime never interests me but here it is in front of us, evidence.”

“Surely it could be coincidence.”

Sherlock pursed his lips and continued to allow his eyes to rove over the items before crouching down alongside the front wheels of the trolley instead.

“I have made no study of the purchasing habits of the typical British family as I also don’t care about mundane lives. That aside I believe this is worthy of investigation John.”

“If you’re doing this just to avoid picking up some damn eggs and a pint of milk-”

“No, I’m doing my job,” Sherlock said, sprawling even further down alongside the trolley, causing a couple to awkwardly wheel their own trolley around his gangly legs and large feet. John gave them a pained, apologetic smile before crouching down with a little wince in an attempt to study whatever had caught the detective’s eye.

“What are we looking at?”

Sherlock jumped back up to his feet, not waiting for John to do the same before unleashing his findings upon the man.

“Footprint suggests size three and a half feet. Narrow. Possibly Clark’s shoes but not custom made considering the fact that this particular supermarket specialises in maintaining “low, low prices”, according their posters and television advertisements. The person either lives locally or walked from nearby streets. No Tube or bus, the prints are too wet for that – there’s a delay on the Northern line today of approximately seven minutes and therefore their shoes would have begun to dry on the train. The jar of pickled gherkins is leaking slightly, there’s a residue on the handle. The print of the palm and fingers suggest a woman’s hand, hard to confirm however, it’s a very faint mark. The trolley was abandoned at the very most fourteen minutes ago.”

John took a moment to digest these facts.

“That’s not so much brilliant as absurd. How on earth can you tell it was abandoned fourteen minutes ago? You surely don’t know about the effects of pickled gherkin vinegar upon plastic trolley handles.”

“No, but I do know that this chain of supermarket do what they call “sweeps” of the aisles every fifteen minutes, to check for spills. It’s a precaution against getting sued in negligence.”

John gave a bemused smirk.

“I thought you didn’t “do” supermarkets.”

“I had a case involving a man who slipped and died in a supermarket in this chain in suspicious circumstances. Turned out to be the work of another injured ex-employee who desperately wanted to get a manager fired for corporate manslaughter whose lack of care he believed had resulted in his own injury a year before.”

“I see,” John nodded dazedly, “Well, I really don’t want to be here all night Sherlock. Go and investigate if you must but I swear it’s a coincidence. Drug barons don’t buy their ingredients in their local supermarket.”

“No, but young up and comers might and it’s only a matter of tracing those to find the man in charge,” Sherlock strode off down the aisle with a backward wave to John, “Meet you at the desk.”

“It’s called a “check out”.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

*

_From: Harry_

_How’s the boyfriend??_

John stuffed his phone back into his pocket and, leaning heavily on the handlebar on the trolley, rolled it down another aisle.

“He’s not my boyfriend, he’s really not,” John muttered to himself, waiting until an old lady and an angry looking mother dragging a screaming child had walked past him, “He’s my ridiculous, absurd, unbelievable roommate.”

He threw a packet of Rich Tea in the trolley only to come to a halt further down the aisle, reverse and replace them more carefully with Ginger Nuts instead.

“He likes them,” he mumbled in justification, “And they’re on offer.”

Fishing his phone back out of his pocket he fired off a reply to his sister.

_To Harry:_

_Mind your own business._

*

One benefit of being taller than average was that it made finding the appropriate supermarket aisles a matter of simply craning one’s neck. Within moments of having cast his gaze about the shop Sherlock was striding down each relevant aisle in turn, stopping when he reached the spot for those items he had found in the abandoned trolley.

“Ah!” he held up his hand as a young woman made to pick up a packet of cold medicine, “Wait. I need to take this in, I need to study this arrangement,” he squatted down to study the drugs for a moment from every angle, a finger pressed thoughtfully against his lips before he nodded in satisfaction, stood up once more and made for the back of the shop.

At the end of the aisle he turned back to the woman, noticing how she was stood stock still and staring after him.

Puzzling over how to respond Sherlock relied on his old standby. He dug a hand into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out one of his many police badges.

“As you were,” he said in his most authoritative voice before striding off once more in search of lye.

*

_From: Harry_

_Is the sex good at least??_

John made a vaguely choked noise of indignation as he gave the text his attention, his other hand reaching for a batternberg. He wheeled a little further along the aisle and grabbed instinctively for a cheap Victoria sponge, aware as he did so of how domestic and how bored he had gotten before having met Sherlock that he knew precisely where the items were without looking.

“She must be bored,” he told himself under his breath as he folded his list in half and considered the final few items, “She can’t actually think that about the two of us. She’s never even met him.”

Lemonade, a pack of Carling and some salted peanuts for their upcoming Bond Night. He set off in the direction of the fizzy drinks aisle, head still bowed over his phone cradled in his hand.

“The blog is informative. It’s there to provide a service, a record. It’s there to prevent myself getting incriminated in-“

As he turned into the aisle he was shocked back to his senses by a loaf of bread thudding down before his blurred vision, landing unthinkingly on top of a bag of tomatoes. Looking up he watched as the detective walked away once more but turning back all the while to give him encouraging looks rather like a puppy who was determined to show off the find of a stick or a terrified frog to its owner.

“Look at the solvent.”

“Must I? Also, why bread? Have we run out? I only brought a loaf home yesterday.”

Sherlock gave a dull frown.

“What was it you asked for?”

“Eggs,” John said irritably, threatening to waft his undecipherable handwriting at Sherlock once again, hand twitching to do so, “And milk.”

“Oh. Well, there’s bread,” Sherlock turned his attention back to the shelves of solvents, back straightening as he did so. The pose made clear that he was about to unveil another inference or piece of deductive reasoning, John knew from his disturbingly in-depth knowledge of the other man’s habits.

“The solvent?”

“This can here,” Sherlock identified the can with the gesture of one long finger, “Has been moved, it’s almost on the lip of the shelf. Below it, just here, is the gap made by the can of solvent that we found in the trolley.”

“So they changed their mind?”

“Why? There is no significant difference in the quality of the active ingredients when used to make meth. It’s a matter of choice. All the other ingredients were also chosen from this particular shelf. No, our woman – or potentially man - is a midget.”

“A dwarf?”

“No,” Sherlock narrowed his eyes in apparent distaste, “Midget. If I meant dwarf, I would say dwarf.”

“Sherlock, are you honestly saying that somewhere in this supermarket there is a midget with an intention of creating homemade meth?”

“When you have eliminated all other possibilities, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. It is unlikely though,” Sherlock said, carrying on with a waft of his hand as he saw John turn angry, “I mean unlikely that they are still here, they will have left by now. Something happened so as to raise the alarm. Perhaps they saw me.”

“Because you’re very daunting.”

“I do have a reputation John.”

“So why investigate if they’ve fled the scene?”

Sherlock shrugged, “I have no other cases. I may as well gather all the evidence I can find and report back to Lestrade. He struggles when left to his own devices, you know that much.”

John took a quiet moment to simply stare ahead of him, wondering as he did so if he could truly remember how civilian life had been before he had met this man. He felt a smile tug at his lips as he realised it was a difficult, not to mention a pointless struggle to conjure any real memories of that time.

“Sherlock, just get the peanuts and the Carling for Bond Night, please?” John asked, slightly more optimistic about the results since he gathered that the detective would want to partake of both of those, the man having shown veiled but only thinly veiled interest at the idea of a movie night.

“If I must.”

As the detective rounded the corner John noticed that he had been holding his mobile all the while and, with one last withering look at the loaf of bread, fired off another text to his sister.

_To: Harry_

The sex is mind-blowing. Now leave me alone. __

*

“I might leave you to do the packing. I can meet you back at Baker Street,” Sherlock said as he finished up his study of all the carbonated drinks on the same level of shelf as the other ingredients he had found for the homemade meth.

“Why?”

“To go and meet with Lestrade and tell him our findings. The culprit isn’t here, they fled, as I predicted.”

John had rather been looking forward to this moment. He shrugged his shoulders a little looser, standing up fully behind the trolley as he let one hand guide it down the aisle towards the self service checkouts. He gave an airy smile to Sherlock as his mouth formed one of the most delicious sentences of the past month.

“Would it surprise you to hear that I’ve already solved the mystery?”

“No,” Sherlock said frankly, “As I have just explained it to you.”

“Incorrectly,” John bit down on a Cheshire cat grin at the rather agog look he gained himself.

“Incorrectly?”

“Yes. Your culprit is still here,” pulling up alongside the self service checkouts, John took Sherlock by the elbow so as to direct the man’s gaze, “Checkout three.”

“That woman might not be especially tall John but she’s no midget.”

“Sherlock, it was the kid.”

Reluctantly, it appeared, Sherlock considered the squealing, wailing child sat in the pull down seat at the front of the trolley. It was all John could do not to rub his hands together in delight or else whip his phone out to take a photo of the dawning realisation passing stormily over the detective’s face.

“You see,” John noted a little smugly, “I am an expert when it comes to mundane lives. Small child gets bored in supermarket. Starts throwing random items into the trolley while mum isn’t watching. Mum finally catches wind of it, threatens to leave supermarket and wheels trolley back that way. Child promises to be good, mum lets them walk alongside the trolley, kid runs off,” he conceded, “I did come across them in one of the aisles while I was shopping.”

After a lengthy paused, filled with the beeps as John began to scan and bag their shopping, Sherlock gave a murmur.

“I wasn’t aware small children knew how to make their own meth,” he said, watching as the mother and daughter left the supermarket, his eyes cast downward.

“I was right about the shoes: Clark’s, size three and a half.”

“Sherlock, it was coincidence. Or, rather, it was your boredom getting the better of you.”

“I need work,” the man softly in a tone that made John come close to cringing, holding as it did an almost desperate quality.

“You’ll get work. You have the monopoly on the field after all.”

Appearing to snap back to his senses Sherlock went on instead to study John with apparently innocent interest.

“One other thing does puzzle me,” he commented while continuing to simply watch John pack everything into the bags, hands in his pockets.

“And what’s that?”

“I wasn’t aware we were having any mind blowing sex.”

John paused halfway through an attempt to scan a bell pepper to stare at Sherlock.

“What have you done to my phone?”

“Well I’m glad you didn’t decide to play ignorant. Call it an experiment,” Sherlock said, taking the pepper carefully from John’s slightly lax grasp and placing it on top of the bread in one carrier bag, “If you don’t put the item down within five seconds it assumes you’ve stolen it. Then you’ll apparently require an assistant in order to continue with your shop.”

“What is an experiment?”

“Also if you pause for twenty seconds or longer during scanning your items the machine will assume you have abandoned your shop,”

“Sherlock,” John said imploringly. The detective gave a very slight lopsided smile.

“I decided to swap my number for Harry’s. You don’t have many contacts in your phone so I can assume you don’t care much for mobile phones. You wouldn’t notice that the number had altered.”

“But why on earth would you want to?”

“Obvious,” Sherlock chastised. The man waited momentarily to see if John would supply the answer himself before elaborating, “To see what you were saying about me. I’m very glad our fictional sex is satisfying for you John.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk so loudly about our sex, fictional or otherwise, in a supermarket.”

“Did you get any Relentless or do I need to stop off for cocaine on the way back to Baker Street?“

“Sherlock, you are unbearable-“

At the word Sherlock’s mood appeared to cloud over and with apprehension John waited for the cruel words that appeared ready to follow this sea change.

“John,” the detective said, tone grim, “You made me miss Jeremy Kyle.”

"Sherlock," John replied, just as coolly, "You are not getting any mind blowing sex tonight."


End file.
